I’m So Late! Also So Happy To Have Been Tagged!

Clement Gelly, “Graffiti, Through Grief and Discovery”, pub. Hazlitt [transcript in ALT]

thank god or the universe or whatever for cycles and seasons though like yeah life right now is unbearable. but every two years the olympics come around again, and every december i have christmas and every year there is an autumn where leaves change and fall and the air is crisp. every year has a halloween, and a national pie day, and my cat's birthday, and national star wars day, and the arbitrary date in february when my family watches the princess bride together, and every fall i watch over the garden wall. next year i'll see my second total solar eclipse. there will be new tomatoes next summer and fresh applesauce the season after that. the sun will come back even when march seems like it will never end. don't go yet. it will be your day off soon. the olympics are next year. it'll be someone's birthday soon. everything changes and everything will come back around again, if you stick around to let it.

german words i wish existed in english

a messy and incomplete list

nachvollziehen (v.) -- to understand, but less empathetic. i.e. i see the steps that brought you to that conclusion, but i don't understand you.

doch (interj.) -- you're wrong and really it's the opposite of what you said. often said with a healthy dose of sass. i.e. "this isn't a good movie." "doch. (it is)"

frech (adj.) -- somewhere between naughty and sassy and silly. when you're being a bit of a brat, you're being frech.

dreist (adj.) -- audacious, but far more colloquial. when you have the goddamn audacity, you are dreist. i.e. to park that far over the line is dreist as hell

heimat (n.) -- home, but stronger. a home is wherever you have built a life, but heimat is where your roots are. heimat is where you feel pangs of nostalgia when you go to visit your family for christmas and see the shop at the corner.

weltschmerz (n.) -- literally 'world-pain'. the world sucks and sometimes you just sit and feel the pain of it all. that's weltschmerz.

existenzberechtigung (n.) -- the right to exist, often in a comedic context. i.e. pineapple on pizza has absolutely no existenzberechtigung.

fernweh (n.) -- literally 'far-ache'. the opposite of homesickness, the desire to go far away. i guess wanderlust is similar, but that is also a german word, and this is more painful and visceral

schweigen (v./n.) -- the act of not speaking. silence, but more deliberate. the palpable feeling that people are withholding their voice.

verschlimmbesserung (n.) -- when an update with the intention of making something better actually just made it worse. looking at you @staff

its so brave that you have such a 2012-coded url in this 2024 world

would you call a bear brave for standing in a new construction suburb or would you recognize the unfamiliar world they built around him

'We said our goodbyes

And blew the stars out

Like candles'

- ellen everett

Redraw of an old drawing i did a while back :)

the real danger of spending too much time with friends is you stumble out of ten days of happiness and good food like oh my god THAT was real life. my job means NOTHING

silent lake

how many times can you live through the apocalypse?

when you were little there was this beach that was free to go to. you didn't really like it on account of the litter. at one point, a white bag caught around your ankle, and for a moment (fish child), you panicked about jellyfish. on the foam, the red-pink words read thank you, stacked on top of each other, tangled in the kelp.

they have a new program (three thousand american dollars) to send your dead relative to the moon. there is a lot of evidence that our local orbit is becoming ever-more dangerously populated with "micro" satellites - debris in a round miasma becoming a thick web above us. maybe angels cannot hear us through the pollution.

you used to picture deep space like a thick membrane, or a blanket. someone said to you once the universe has no edge and that fucked with you for a long time, trying to picture what shape infinity has. your coworker is writing a short story about ecological collapse, which she is submitting for a little side-money so she can survive the current economical collapse.

the birds haven't gone to sleep this winter. that is probably bad. something that actually freaks you out is the natural temperature of human bodies versus the survival temperature of certain fungi. there is a podcast called s-town, in which a man kills himself over climate anxiety. he was probably meant to seem sort of unhinged. it just seems like it is becoming increasingly clear he was being honest.

space is not empty, we have put our dead into the stars. at some point they will figure out how to put ads into our sleep. you need to pay for the greenlife subscription service to be able to save the world.

there is a lot of ways this poem ends. but you have been wearing the same jeans and shirts since you were, like, 18. it is a hard life, sometimes, watching the entire foundation crack. there was this one moment over the summer, where you were shaking with heat exhaustion and dehydration. you were offered a nestle water bottle.

for three thousand dollars, you can send your ashes into space.

instead, you wash out the peanut butter jar. you put the avocado-toothpick spiked seed ball into water (even though they never grow very far). you borrow what you do not want to buy. you pick up any litter you find. you do not have a lot of control, really. but where you do - if there is one thing you can do, you do it.

something about that. you need to believe that must be true for the rest of humanity. or maybe - you need to believe that to be true, or else there will not be a rest of humanity.

Yesterday was a bad day, my apartment was too quiet. Too empty. There was nothing, nothing.

Then suddenly I was turning on lights and they were the perfect shade of yellow and the music from my little speaker hit me so hard I almost cried in the kitchen and those socks I bought kept my feet warm and my warmed-up tortellini were so good with the scrapes of my mom's pesto.

I listened to Billie Eilish and Hozier and The Neighborhood and suddenly they were just people.

Sometimes I lay in bed terrified that I'll stop feeling. Yesterday was not that day.

Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, Chen Chen